Virtuosity (6 page)

A siren blared outside my window and then faded as it headed east toward Lake Michigan. Toward Symphony Center.

I had to hear him play.

Inderal had saved me. I hated everything about those powdery-orange hexagonal pills, starting with the bitter taste they left on the back of my tongue, but I didn’t have a choice anymore. The more I used them, the more I needed to be saved.

It had started with Diana. No, that’s not quite fair. It had started with the worst performance of my life.

Before Tokyo, I had never given much thought to stage fright. I had grown up onstage. Any problems I had with nerves had been worked out before the age of seven. Nerves were for the unprepared, or for the people who lacked talent and needed a scapegoat.

But then Tokyo happened. It was last spring, the last stop on my first Asian tour and I was playing my new Strad. At first, I felt nothing unusual. I stood at the edge
of stage left, waiting for my cue to walk on while Diana adjusted the purple lotus blossom in my hair and picked stray threads off my silk shantung gown. She fluttered. That was what she did, how she handled her stress. But it wasn’t Diana that rattled me.

The Tokyo Philharmonic was tuning on stage as the audience filtered back in from intermission. The concert was sold out, but it wasn’t the audience that set me off either. Packed houses were the norm and audiences were too easily impressed to be scary.

I closed my eyes, concentrating on the adrenalin coursing through me. That thrill, that plummeting-roller-coaster feeling, always hit right before. Trying to concentrate on something, to focus my thoughts, helped. I willed my index finger steady and traced my name in cursive on the red velvet curtain, almost like leaving graffiti on a brick wall. I’d never actually held a can of spray paint, but I understood the urge. It would be nice to change all the places I’d been. The audiences would leave and forget, but there was some weird appeal in making the concert halls remember me. Too bad finger-tracing on velvet wasn’t permanent.

Then I turned and looked at the musicians, and everything changed. Some were looking at their music, others were staring out into the audience, a few were whispering with each other.

But then my eyes fell on the principal second violinist. His violin rested on his knee, and his eyes bored right into me, expressionless. Why was he staring at me? What was he thinking? Suddenly, his face didn’t look expressionless. It looked angry.

All around him, the throng of violinists continued their fidgeting, their whispering. What were any of them thinking? I’d never really wondered before. They had impossible-to-win chairs in one of the best symphonies in the world, but they weren’t the soloist tonight or any night. Of course. They’d all played the Sibelius Concerto, probably knew my part as well as I did. They’d probably dreamed of being the soloist their whole lives. But they weren’t. They were waiting to accompany me. They must hate me.

My gut twisted up. My fingers turned cold and sweaty.
They hate me.
The stage manager’s earpiece crackled with static and he said something in Japanese into the microphone at his lips. Then he tapped my shoulder. His finger felt sharp on my bare skin, and he said, “If you please, miss,” with a nod of his head. He gestured to the stage.

I didn’t please. The neck of my violin felt suddenly slippery in my palm.
They want me to screw up.
Why hadn’t I realized that before? I couldn’t play with my hands this shaky.

A crowd had gathered behind me: backstage people,
sound technicians, extra musicians who weren’t playing until the second half, and anyone else milling around who wanted to see what Carmen Bianchi, the child prodigy with the million-dollar Gibson Strad, looked like right before she went on stage, wanted to hear from the sidelines so they could go back and tell their friends, “She wasn’t that great, and her nose is much bigger in person.”

But I had no choice. I swallowed and charged into the open space before me. At the sound of my heels on the stage, the musicians sprang to their feet and the audience erupted with deafening applause. My knees nearly buckled. I blinked against the harshness of the stage lights and forced my feet to keep moving, nearly tripping over an electrical cord as I passed in front of the violins.
Smile,
I thought, knowing Diana was silently willing me to look the part.

At center stage, I shook the conductor’s hand, then the concertmaster’s. Their firm grips should have anchored me, but they squeezed too hard, and shook too vigorously. I nearly toppled over my own feet.

The noise, which had been overwhelming, suddenly died. Silence was worse. The oboist’s “A” floated up from the woodwind section and I tuned, feeling every musician on stage listening, judging my ear already. I closed my eyes and swallowed, then nodded to the conductor to begin.

The opening of the Sibelius Violin Concerto is
supposed to sparkle like ice crystals. It should have been Finland at night, glittering with snow. It was the wrong concerto for this disaster. If only I was playing Brahms, I could come crashing out of the gate, fingers flying, strings snapping, then I could have hidden my nerves long enough to get control. Sibelius was too still, too transparent. On the first note, my bow skidded and bounced. My vibrato sounded too tight but I couldn’t loosen it, and then I overshot the first shift.

That sour note hung in the concert hall, ringing in everyone’s ears. I could feel the disappointment of every musician in the house. No, not disappointment. Satisfaction.

More skidding, more awkward bow changes, more agony followed, until my heart stopped sprinting and slowed a little, and then a little more until it reached its normal pace. Eventually, my fingers grew steadier and autopilot took over so I could hide in the back of my brain and pretend I was somewhere else. Thousands of hours of practice drove my body through the performance. I barely remembered the rest.

The postconcert hoopla was torture. The fake smiling and schmoozing dragged on and on, first with musicians, then the conductor, then with the rich patrons whose donations earned face time with whomever they wanted to meet. I was the emperor in his new clothes, and nobody
would admit I had been naked. But we all knew. I’d sucked.

Finally, when I climbed into the cab to go back to the hotel, I’d put my head in Diana’s lap and cried like a little girl. She hadn’t said much, but took the clips out of my hair and combed through it with her fingers, letting me leak mascara all over her white skirt.

Diana had been smart. She’d waited for two weeks, until after we’d come home and the humiliation had dried. I’d spent those two weeks reading, going for daily runs with Clark, watching
America’s Next Top Model
marathons. I only practiced an hour or so a day. It was nice.

“Chocolate?” Diana had asked, holding out a box of my favorites, Callebaut milk chocolate truffles. I was stretched out on the couch reading
My Name Is Asher Lev
.

“Of course.” I took one and popped it into my mouth.

“Haven’t you already read that?” she asked and sat down beside me, forcing me to bend my legs and make room for her.

“Yup.”

I let the truffle melt in my mouth and turned the page.

“So, let’s talk about Tokyo.”

She was trying so hard to be casual, but the words jumped out as if she’d snapped her fingers in front of my eyes.

“Tokyo,” I said.

“Yes, Tokyo.”

I’d spent the last two weeks pushing it out of my
thoughts. Now that I was being forced to think about it, I had the sudden urge to throw up.

“That can’t happen again,” she said. Her words were slow and even. “Careers don’t survive more than one of that kind of catastrophe.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I said softly. “I don’t know what happened. I just …”

“I know, honey.” She held out the shiny gold box of truffles again, but I shook my head. “I’ve been thinking about a solution, and I have an idea. Yuri thinks it’s a good one.”

I waited. A
solution
. It hadn’t even occurred to me that anyone else could fix this mess.

“We can’t ignore it. It will happen again, and it doesn’t matter how incredible you really are if you self-destruct onstage.”

The words sounded rehearsed, and she looked straight ahead at the painting on the wall.

“Performance anxiety is a real issue for a lot of musicians,” she continued. “It’s an actual disorder, and there are medications available that can help you deal with it. They’re called beta-blockers.” She cleared her throat. “If you’d like, we could get you a prescription.”

A prescription. A dozen questions descended. Would they make me jittery? Would I play as well? Were they
allowed
?

Instead I asked, “Would anybody know?”

“Of course not.”

“But what would it feel like?”

“Just like it does when you’re practicing. Beta-blockers don’t make people better musicians. They’ll just take care of the nerves. That’s all.”

So simple. That was all I wanted. It wasn’t like an athlete taking steroids to get stronger—I already
was
the violinist I wanted to be. My mind cycled around and around. I needed this to work. I needed it to be right. But she wouldn’t be suggesting it if it was wrong, if it was cheating. Yuri agreed, she had said.

I wanted her to look at me, but she was still staring at the painting.

“Did you used to take them?” I asked.

Her eyebrows lifted just a little, almost imperceptibly. I’d caught her by surprise.

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I didn’t need them.”

Of course she didn’t. I should have known.

Diana had already scheduled the appointment with Dr. Wright. He came highly recommended, she said. I wasn’t worried. Dry cleaners, massage therapists, violin teachers, bikini waxers—Diana thoroughly researched all her professionals.

“Describe what it feels like,” he said.

Dr. Wright didn’t look like a psychiatrist. He looked like a first-year med student in his big brother’s lab coat. Why would a psychiatrist need a lab coat anyway, unless he was specifically trying to look more “medical”?

“Carmen?”

“Sorry?” I said.

“The performance anxiety. How does that feel?” His voiced cracked.

Like someone is squeezing my stomach and pouring liquid nitrogen on my joints, I wanted to say. “Bad,” I said.

Diana cleared her throat. She sat beside me with hands clasped over her knee. Apparently one-word answers were not going to fly.

“My hands shake,” I said. “My stomach hurts.”

Dr. Wright nodded and wrote something down. “Do you generally sleep well?”

“Besides the violin nerves, she’s a normal, happy, teenage girl,” Diana said.

Dr. Wright’s timid gaze went from me to Diana to me again. He looked like he was trying to decide whether to ask me the sleep question again, or if he should just give Diana his lunch money.

“What she needs is a prescription for beta-blockers,” Diana continued. “Her nerves are a pretty typical response
for a soloist who’s facing the kind of intense pressure that she’s under. There’s a lot riding on each performance—contracts, competitions, recordings, you know …” Her voice trailed off and she put a protective hand on my back and leaned forward in her chair. “Violin demands a lot from her, but she is one of the best in the world.”

That was the clincher. Dr. Wright looked down at his desk and reached for a pen and prescription pad. He clearly didn’t want to be the man standing in the way of me becoming the best violinist in the world. Or maybe he just wanted to get rid of us.

Five minutes later we were back in the safety of the Diana’s Lexus listening to
Aida
, with a prescription for Inderal tucked into the zipper pocket of Diana’s snakeskin clutch.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

I nodded, but didn’t look at her, didn’t say anything, just kept picking at the callous on the tip of my index finger.

“I know what you’re worried about,” she said, “but nobody else is going to know. You don’t have to tell anyone. This is between you, me, and Yuri. Frankly, it isn’t anyone else’s business.”

I nodded. Shame. Finally. It felt like rotten milk curdling in my stomach. I had spent all morning trying not to think anything, but there it was.
You, me, and Yuri.
What about Clark? If it was really okay, he would know too. But obviously it wasn’t really okay.

Diana hadn’t lied about what it would be like. She just hadn’t really known.

The chalky little pills looked more like vitamin C than anything else. I transferred them into a nondescript wooden pillbox and put them in the rosin pocket of my case. They looked completely innocent.

“If anyone asks,” Diana said, “tell them they’re for cramps.”

Nobody asked. In the beginning, they worked miracles. An hour after my very first pill, I walked onstage for a performance with the Montreal Symphony with steady hands, in complete control of every movement. But by November, I needed two pills for the same steady hands. And then three. And then not just for performances, but for lessons too. I could justify that, though. Lessons are a type of performance, aren’t they? Yuri’s temper didn’t make it easy either. I needed to be calm to get through each lesson and learn what had to be learned.

Dr. Wright said that didn’t make sense. At the follow-up appointment, he said Inderal isn’t
physically
addictive like that. If I felt like I needed more and more, he said, that’s a
psychological
addiction, and I should just trust that the dosage he’d given me was adequate.

I left confused—had my psychiatrist just told me I was crazy? It didn’t matter.
I
knew I needed at least three pills per performance. For now.

I tried not to think about it, and when I did, I told myself it was worth it. I just had to remember Tokyo and that stomach-wrenching stage fright to know it was. With Inderal, I never had to feel like that again.

Now when I was onstage, I didn’t feel much of anything.

Chapter 7